Navigating the Blogging Community

I think I heard Marianne Williamson say once that if you have something that you feel the need to say, there is someone out there that needs to hear it. I might be misquoting and I might be incorrect about the source... I want to write about the sentiment.

I've been blogging in an isolated space for six months. I didn't know much about the blogging community (beyond the fact that it existed) and I didn't care. I started this blog because I wanted to write about something I feel driven to explore. I wanted to use writing as a way to deepen the exploration. Now, a few weeks after purchasing a real blogging service (Typepad) and a few days after discovering blog directories and audience feeders, I'm finding some aspects of being in this community distracting, uncomfortable, unappealing.

I spent the past two days pimping my site on Blog Explosion and BlogAzoo. I must have viewed close to 200 websites and found maybe 5 that I will visit again. I created a banner for my blog:

I assigned credits, I exploited the power of Firefox tabbed browsing and had multiple browsing sessions going on at once trying to rack up points and site visits. A couple of people made really nice comments on my blog. It was exciting... My first comments! Then I started to think about these past few days and how far I've deviated from my purpose here.

In all that time, I could have been meditating. I could have been reading. I could have spent more time with my daughter. I could have been writing. I could have been doing kong'an (Korean romanization of the word "koan") practice (the Buddhist temple I attend is of Korean lineage). I could've gotten some exercise instead of sitting on my futon all day with a computer in my lap. I wasted two days of my life for what I can now see is nothing but the Drum Major Instinct that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. talked about in his sermon of the same name. A few excerpts:

There is deep down within all of us an instinct. It's a kind of drum major instinct—a desire to be out front, a desire to lead the parade, a desire to be first. And it is something that runs the whole gamut of life.

We all want to be important, to surpass others, to achieve distinction, to lead the parade. Alfred Adler, the great psychoanalyst, contends that this is the dominant impulse. Sigmund Freud used to contend that sex was the dominant impulse, and Adler came with a new argument saying that this quest for recognition, this desire for attention, this desire for distinction is the basic impulse, the basic drive of human life, this drum major instinct.

And you know, we begin early to ask life to put us first. Our first cry as a baby was a bid for attention. And all through childhood the drum major impulse or instinct is a major obsession. Children ask life to grant them first place. They are a little bundle of ego. And they have innately the drum major impulse or the drum major instinct.

As I went pimping around, I discovered something... some piece of this instinct in myself. It is so Junior High! I want people to like my blog. I want people to value what I say. For a minute I forgot what I was doing here and I went for blogging community prom queen. I went for popularity. I went for traffic. I hope I never get caught up in the blog pimping business again. I will leave my listings out there... and perhaps people will find this site like I found Ow, My Blog and others... If there is an audience for Buddhist blogs, people will search for them. My whoring days are over. I'm off to try to be a bodhisattva... off to save the world one breath at a time.